A friend sent me an email about some new people, all Japanese, she had met at a party. There was a young man who had worked in Africa for Medecins Sans Frontieres. One middle-age man had quit a stable job in broadcasting to study French in Paris. A female graduate student in marine biology was also there. She apparently told my friend how much she detested Japan's buddy-buddy acquiescence in George W. Bushs "war on terror."

I myself have recently encountered a Japanese who volunteers at a women's refuge in Shibuya; an elderly man who despairs so much about growing Japanese nationalism that he is contemplating moving overseas, though he has never been outside of this country; and two high school students, both female, who are studying Korean "in order to learn about the country that gave Japan so much culture and civilization in our history."

It all set me to thinking about how diverse this country is in its social makeup and yet how hidebound, conventional and intellectually impoverished is its contemporary media. Reading Japan's major newspapers, watching television, listening to the radio, you get almost no idea that people such as those described above exist in Japan. The Japanese media of our century is pitching to the blandest common denominator, as if the entire nation were a niche market of 126,000,000 like-minded consumers, all in agreement about what to say, where to go and how to think.